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Dr Marta Simo-Comas

Dr Marta Simó Comas profile picture

Joint Outreach Lead for the Department of Languages and Cultures

Office

Miller G22

Building location

Miller building

Areas of interest

My research interests lie principally in Peninsular twentieth-century fiction, especially from the 1980s to the present. I wrote my PhD, and a subsequent monograph, on the works of the Spanish writer José Luis Sampedro (1917-2013), focusing on characterization through the interchange between story (in its temporal and spatial dimensions) and discourse and situating this within the broader context of the Western novel and the symbolic tradition.

In 2016 I contributed to a documentary, produced by Radio Nacional de España, celebrating Sampedro’s significance as a writer and as a thinker.

More recently I have written on the works of other contemporary authors, such as José María Merino (b. 1941), Cristina Fernández Cubas (b. 1945) and Marta Sanz (b.1967).

My research covers four major areas:

  • contemporary Spanish narrative
  • the nature of narrative, metafiction, realism, the continuity of literary and conceptual traditions and the survival of universal symbolic motifs and myths in contemporary fiction
  • the uncanny in contemporary narrative
  • the publishing industry and cultural policies during the Spanish Transition to Democracy.

Postgraduate supervision

I welcome proposals from prospective doctoral students with an interest in any of the areas of my research interests outlined above.

Current supervisions:

  • Begoña Garrido Were all Basque women ‘La Pasionaria’? Negotiating gendered spaces in working-class Basque women’s testimonies of Bizkaia, under Franco (1937-1949).

Teaching

I convene and teach SP2MCN (Spanish Modern and Contemporary Narratives). I co-teach on the following modules:

  • SP1L3 (Advanced Spanish Language I)
  • SP2L4 (Advanced Spanish Language II) SP1L1 (Icons of Spain and Latin America)
  • SP1SLAC (Introduction to Spanish and Latin American Culture), which I convene
  • ML1GEC (Greats of European Cinema)
  • ML2GF (Science, Perversion and Dream in Global Fantastic Literature)
  • ML3CW (Cinemas of the World) ML3NCEF (19th Century European Fiction)

Research centres and groups

I am a member of the international network ‘Prácticas culturales y esfera pública: editoras españolas latinoamericanas contemporáneas / Cultural Practice and Public Sphere: Contemporary Spanish and Latin American Female Publishers’, funded by Spain´s Ministry of Education and Culture and led by Dr Pura Fernández, based at the CSIC.

I also contribute to the EDI-RED database of Ibero-American Editors and Publishers.

Academic qualifications

  • Lic.Fil. (Universitat de Barcelona)
  • PhD (Exeter)

Publications